2011年6月大学英语六级真题试卷

Minority Report

American universities are accepting more minorities than ever. Graduating them is another matter.

Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, was justifiably proud of Bowdoin’s efforts to recruit minority students. Since 2003 the small, elite liberal arts school in Brunswick, Maine, has boosted the proportion of so-called under-represented minority students in entering freshman classes from 8% to 13% . “It is our responsibility to reach out and attract students to come to our kinds of places,” he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. But Bowdoin has not done quite as well when it comes to actually graduating minorities. While 9 out of 10 white students routinely get their diplomas within six years, only 7 out of 10 black students made it to graduation day in several recent classes.

“If you look at who eithers college, it now looks like America,” says Hilary Pennington, director of postsecondary programs for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has closely studied enrollment patterns in higher education. “ But if you look at who walks across the stage for a diploma, it’s still largely the white, upper-income population.

The United States once had the highest graduation rate of any nation. Now it stands 10th. For the first time in American history, there is the risk that the rising generation will be less well educated than the previous one. The graduation rate among 25-to 34-year-olds is no better than the rate for the 55-to 64-year-olds who were going to college more than 30 years ago. Studies show that more and more poor and non-white students want to graduate from college— but their graduation rates fill far short of their dreams. The graduation rates for blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans lag far behind the graduation rates for whites and Asians. As the minority population grows in the United States, low college graduation rates be some a threat to national prosperity.

The problem is pronounced at public universities. In 2007 the University of Wisconsin-Madison—one of the top five or so prestigious publi 3 universities—graduated 81 % of its white students within six years, but only 56% of its blacks. At less-selective slate schools, the numbers get worse. During the same time frame, the University of Northern Iowa graduated 67% of its white students, but only 39% of its blacks. Community colleges have low graduation rates generally—but rock-bottom rates for minorities. A recent review of California community colleges found that while a third of the Asian students picked up their degrees, only 15% of African-Americans did so as well.

Private colleges and universities generally do better, partly because they offer smaller classes and more personal attention. But when it cones to a significant graduation gap, Bowdoin has company. Nearby Colby College logged an 18-point difference between white and black graduates in 2007 and 25 points in 2006. Middlebury College in Vermont, another top school, had a 19-point gap in 2007 and a 22-point gap in 2006. The most selective private schools— Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—show almost no gap between black and white graduation rates. But that may have more to do with their ability to select the best students. According to data gathered by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, the most selective schools are more likely to choose blacks who have at least one immigrant parent from Africa or the Caribbean than black students who are descendants of American slaves.

” Higher education has been able to duck this issue for years, particularly the more selective schools, by saying the responsibility is on the individual student,” says Pennington of the Gates Foundation. “If they fail, it’s their fault. ” Some critics blame affirmative action-students admitted with lower test scores and grades from shaky high schools often struggle at elite schools. But a bigger problem may be that poor high schools often send their students to colleges for which they are “ undermatched” : they could get into more elite, richer schools, but instead go to community colleges and low-rated state schools that lack the resources to help them. Some schools out for profit cynically increase tuitions and count on student loans and federal aid to foot the bill—knowing full well that the students won’t make it. “ The school keeps the money, but the kid leaves with loads of debt and no degree and no ability to get a better job. Colleges are not holding up their end,” says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust.

A college education is getting ever more expensive. Since 1982 tuitions have been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation. In 2008 the net cost of attending a four-year public university—after financial aid—equaled 28% of median (中间的) family income, while a four-year private university cost 76% of median family income. More and more scholarships are based on merit, not need. Poorer students are not always the best-informed consumers. Often they wind up deeply in debt or simply unable to pay after a year or two and must drop out.

There once was a time when universities took pride in their dropout rates. Professors would begin the year by saying, “Look to the right and look to the left. One of you is not going to be here by the end of the year. ” But such a Darwinian spirit is beginning to give way as at least a few colleges face up to the graduation gap. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the gap has been roughly halved over the last three years. The university has poured resources into peer counseling to help students from inner-city schools adjust to the rigor(严格要求) and faster pace of a university classroom—and also to help minority students overcome the stereotype that they are less qualified. Wisconsin has a “ laserlike focus” on building up student skills in the first three months, according to vice provost(教务长)Damon Williams.

State and federal governments could sharpen that focus everywhere by broadly publishing minority graduation rates. For years private colleges such as Princeton and MIT have had success bringing minorities onto campus in the summer before freshman year to give them some preparatory courses. The newer trend is to start recruiting poor and non-white students as early as the seventh grade, using innovative tools to identify kids with sophisticated verbal skills. Such programs can be expensive, of course, but cheap compared with the millions already invested in scholarships and grants for kids who have little chance to graduate without special support.

With effort and money, the graduation gap can be closed. Washington and Lee is a small, selective school in Lexington, Va. Its student body is less than 5% black and less than 2% Latino. While the school usually graduated about 90% of its whites, the graduation rate of its blacks and Latinos had dipped to 63% by 2007. “We went through a dramatic shift,” says Dawn Watkins, the vice president for student affairs. The school aggressively pushed mentoring (辅导) of minorities by other students and” partnering” with parents at a special pre-enrollment session. The school had its first-ever black homecoming. Last spring the school graduated the same proportion of minorities as it did whites. If the United States wants to keep up in the global economic race, it will have to pay systematic attention to graduating minorities, not just enrolling them.

In America, people are faced with more and more decisions every day, whether it’s picking one of 31 ice cream【B1】___or deciding whether and when to get married. That sounds like a great thing. But as a recent study has shown, too many choices can make us【B2】___, unhappy—even paralyzed with indecision.

That’s【B3】___true when it comes to the workplace, says Barry Schwartz, an author of six books about human【B4】. Students are graduating with a【B5】of skills and interests, but often find themselves【B6】___when it comes to choosing an ultimate career goal.

In a study, Schwartz observed decision-making among college students during their【B7】___year. Based on the answers to questions regarding their job-hunting【B8】___and career decisions, he divided the students into two groups; “maximizers” who consider every possible option, and “satisficers” who look until they find an option that is good enough.

You might expect that the students 【B9】______. But it turns out that’s not true. Schwartz found that while maximizers ended up with better paying jobs than satisficers on average, they weren’t as happy with their decision.

The reason【B10】___. When you look at every possible option, you tend to focus more on what was given up than what was gained. After surveying every option,【B11】___.

At the heart of the debate over illegal immigration lies one key question: are immigrants good or bad for the economy? The American public overwhelmingly thinks they’re bad. Yet the consensus among most economists is that immigration, both legal and illegal, provides a small net boost to the economy. Immigrants provide cheap labor, lower the prices of everything from farm produce to new homes, and leave consumers with a little more money in their pockets. So why is there such a discrepancy between the perception of immigrants’ impact on the economy and the reality?

There are a number of familiar theories. Some argue that people are anxious and feel threatened by an inflow of new workers. Others highlight the strain that undocumented immigrants place on public services, like schools, hospitals, and jails. Still others emphasize the role of race, arguing that foreigners add to the nation’s fears and insecurities. There’s some truth to all these explanations, but they aren’t quite sufficient.

To get a better understanding of what’s going on, consider the way immigration’s impact is felt. Though its overall effect may be positive, its costs and benefits are distributed unevenly. David Card, an economist at UC Berkeley, notes that the ones who profit most directly from immigrants’ low-cost labor are businesses and employers—meatpacking plants in Nebraska, for instance, or agricultural businesses in California. Granted, these producers’ savings probably translate into lower prices at the grocery store, but how many consumers make that mental connection at the checkout counter? As for the drawbacks of illegal immigration, these, too, are concentrated. Native low-skilled workers suffer most from the competition of foreign labor. According to a study by George Boreas, a Harvard economist, immigration reduced the wages of American high-school dropouts by 9% between 1980 -2000.

Among high-skilled, better-educated employees, however, opposition was strongest in states with both high numbers of immigrants and relatively generous social services. What worried them most, in other words, was the fiscal (财政的) burden of immigration. That conclusion was reinforced by another finding; that their opposition appeared to soften when that fiscal burden decreased, as occurred with welfare reform in the 1990s, which curbed immigrants’ access to certain benefits.

The irony is that for all the overexcited debate, the net effect of immigration is minimal. Even for those most acutely affected—say, low-skilled workers, or California residents—the impact isn’t all that dramatic. “The unpleasant voices have tended to dominate our perceptions,” says Daniel Tichenor, a political science professor at the University of Oregon, “ But when all those factors are put together and the economists calculate the numbers, it ends up being a net positive, but a small one. ” Too bad most people don’t realize it.

Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time; male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.

It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.

Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach-arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.

Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.

Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management-at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.

Organised volunteering and work experience has long been a vital companion to university degree courses. Usually it is left to【C1】___to deduce the potential from a list of extracurricular adventures on a graduate’s resume, 【C2】now the University of Bristol has launched an award to formalise the achievements of students who【C3】time to activities outside their courses. Bristol PLuS aims to boost students in an increasingly【C4】job market by helping them acquire work and life skills alongside【C5】___qualifications.

“Our students are a pretty active bunch, but we found that they didn’t【C6】___appreciate the value of what they did【C7】the lecture hall,” says Jeff Goodman, director of careers and employability at the university. “Employers are much more【C8】than they used to be. They used to look for【C9】and saw it as part of their job to extract the value of an applicant’s skills. Now they want students to be able to explain why those skills are【C10】___to the job.

Students who sign【C11】___for the award will be expected to complete 50 hours of work experience or【C12】work, attend four workshops on employ ability skills, take part in an intensive skills-related activity【C13】crucially, write a summary of the skills they have gained. 【C14】efforts will gain an Outstanding Achievement Award. Those who【C15】___best on the sports field can take the Sporting PLuS Award which fosters employer-friendly sports accomplishments.

The experience does not have to be【C16】___organised. “We’re not just interested in easily identifiable skills,” says Goodman. “【C17】, one student took the lead ir dealing with a difficult landlord and so【C18】___negotiation skills. We try to make the experience relevant to individual lives.

Goodman hopes the【C19】___will enable active students to fill in any gaps in their experience and encourage their less-active【C20】___to take up activities outside their academic area of work.

How good are you at saying “no”? For many, it’s surprisingly difficult. This is especially true of editors, who by nature tend to be eager and engaged participants in everything they do. Consider these scenarios:

It’s late in the day. That front-page package you’ve been working on is nearly complete; one last edit and it’s finished. Enter the executive editor, who makes a suggestion requiring a more-than-modest rearrangement of the design and the addition of an information box. You want to scream: “ No \ It’s done!” What do you do?

The first rule of saying no to the boss is don’t say no. She probably has something in mind when she makes suggestions, and it’s up to you to find out what. The second rule is don’t raise the stakes by challenging her authority. That issue is already decided. The third rule is to be ready to cite options and consequences. The boss’s suggestions might be appropriate, but there are always consequences. She might not know about the pages backing up that need attention, or about the designer who had to go home sick. Tell her she can have what she wants, but explain the consequences. Understand what she’s trying to accomplish and propose a Plan B that will make it happen without destroying what you’ve done so far.

Here’s another case. Your least-favorite reporter suggests a dumb story idea. This one should be easy, but it’s not. If you say no, even politely, you risk inhibiting further ideas, not just from that reporter, but from others who heard that you turned down the idea. This scenario is common in newsrooms that lack a systematic way to filter story suggestions.

Two steps are necessary. First, you need a system for how stories are proposed and reviewed. Reporters can tolerate rejection of their ideas if they believe they were given a fair hearing. Your gut reaction (本能反应) and dismissive rejection, even of a worthless idea, might not qualify as systematic or fair.

Second, the people you work with need to negotiate a “What if … ?” agreement covering “What if my idea is turned down?” How are people expected to react? Is there an appeal process? Can they refine the idea and resubmit it? By anticipating “What if… ?” situations before they happen, you can reach understanding that will help ease you out of confrontations.